Jafar Panahi Showcases Prohibited Film at Sydney Film Festival

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Jafar Panahi stands out as one of Iran’s most distinguished filmmakers, yet despite his impressive 30-year career, many of his films face bans in his native country.

He has faced accusations of “propaganda against the regime,” leading to two imprisonments since 2010. This has not deterred the 65-year-old director, who continues his filmmaking efforts in secret.

His recent film, It Was Just an Accident, was inspired by his prison experiences, particularly the time he spent in solitary confinement at Tehran’s infamous Evin prison in 2010.

A man in a black suit and sunglasses stands and smiles as people sitting around him clap.

Jafar Panahi made an unexpected appearance at the opening night of the Sydney Film Festival. Source: Supplied / SFF/Tim Levy

Speaking with SBS News ahead of the film’s Australian premiere, Panahi recounts being locked in a cell barely big enough to lie down and forced to sit blindfolded for weeks on end.

His only contact during this time was with a faceless interrogator, whose identity remains a mystery to this day.

“I only talked when they took me to interrogation … I would have sat on a chair facing the wall, with my eyes closed, blindfolded, and behind me was the interrogator. He would talk or write something, and give it to me,” he says.

Only then did my sense of hearing work. It means that all your senses will fade, and you just become curious to see who you are dealing with and [try to] understand their personality from their voice.

“At that time, I tried to keep all the details of this voice in mind … How much of that voice is with me now, I don’t really know. Whether I would remember it if the same person came and spoke behind me, I don’t really know,” Panahi says.

Iranian director wins top prize at Cannes, urging 'unity' and 'freedom' image

Panahi’s lingering curiosity about his interrogator and whether he would recognise him if they encountered each other again forms the basis for the film, although he stresses it’s not autobiographical.

It tells the story of a group of former political prisoners in Iran who stumble across and subsequently kidnap a man they believe to be their former torturer while on a road trip. They then wrestle with the dilemma of what to do: show mercy or exact revenge.

“Some of it was my experience, and the rest of it was the experience of other friends in prison … I definitely didn’t have the experience those friends had in prison,” he says.

“When I came out [of prison], after a while, the things I had heard would come to my mind and they would live with me, and I realised that I had to express them somehow, and eventually, when they were outpoured, it became ‘It Was Just an Accident’.

“This film starts with the voice at the beginning, and then it follows with those stories.”

From persecution to innovation

Panahi first started exploring experiences of imprisonment under Iran’s regime in 2000 with his film The Circle, which is a critical analysis of the treatment of women in Iran from the perspective of two prison escapees.

Little did he know he would be arrested and sentenced to time in prison just ten years later during Iran’s Green Movement protests.

The then-50-year-old had been working on a film set amid the protests, which rose in response to the 2009 presidential election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — a result many believed was rigged.

Hundreds, including Panahi, were arrested, and several were killed during the movement. He was subsequently banned from filmmaking, giving interviews and travelling outside of Iran for 20 years and sentenced to six years in prison.

Panahi managed to remain free, and it was at that point that he took his filmmaking underground.

Over the coming decade, he would produce some of the most notable films of his career, including 2011’s This is Not a Film, which he co-directed with Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and famously smuggled out of the country on a USB wedged into a cake.

“When I was first given a 20-year ban from working, I was thinking about what I should do now,” Panahi says.

Should I say goodbye to the cinema? Should I be sidelined? Or should I look for a solution to how to work?

Rather than act as a deterrent, the ban propelled Panahi into a period of innovation. Along with This is Not a Film, he produced Closed Curtain in 2013 and Taxi in 2015, which round out a trilogy of films shot covertly while Panahi was under house arrest in northern Iran.

The film is shot entirely from the inside of a car, using a camera attached to the windshield, which mimics an “anti-theft device” typically placed on car dashboards. The actors each enter and exit the scenes as Panahi, who is driving, picks them up and drops them off.

Two men smiling inside a car, with the driver wearing glasses and a flat cap.

Taxi was filmed secretly in Tehran, with Jafar Panahi posing as a taxi driver and using a camera disguised as a security device. Credit: Supplied

“We slowly found a solution to come out of the house and film on the street … I found a solution to go into a village and even to the border. I could even send my group across the border,” Panahi says.

“We found ways to do all of this. Of course, it had its own difficulties.”

Just over a decade after his filmmaking ban was first enforced, in July 2022, Panahi was arrested when he went to the prosecutor’s office in support of his fellow filmmakers, Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Aleahmad, who were being held in detention.

Panahi would spend the next seven months in prison, listening to stories from inmates — stories that would lay the groundwork for It Was Just an Accident.

“I had a lot of time and every time I talked to one of these people. They wanted to talk all the time, and I was an attentive listener; I sat and listened to what they had to say,” he says.

Panahi was released in February 2023, just days after he started a hunger strike in protest against the behaviour of the security and judicial apparatus in Iran.

He quickly set about working on his next film.

A bride and groom sit at the back of a van in a desert, as a man stands nearby under the setting sun.

In Iran, all films must first get a production permit before filming begins, and then a separate screening permit after the film is completed. The country’s culture and Islamic guidance ministry is responsible for the permits. Credit: Supplied

‘Film is valuable work’

As with his other films over the last 15 years, Panahi shot and produced It Was Just an Accident without obtaining the usual permissions required by Iran’s culture and Islamic guidance ministry, which strictly regulates film production in the country. It was filmed in secret, and the female actors didn’t wear the country’s compulsory hijab.

“In countries that have totalitarian governments, they try to create conditions in any way possible that they are not united with each other,” he says.

“When we live inside Iran, we can feel this very well.”

Despite the challenges of making films and the constant threat of imprisonment, Panahi remains resolute in his commitment to the art form.

“I’m a filmmaker who is focused on social issues. I get inspiration from the society I live in and I create my own film,” he says.

“First, I have to accept that that film is a valuable work that I can put my signature on.”

I really hope my film gets shown in Iran and that Iranians get to see it. I’ve worked very hard for it.

International acclaim

It Was Just an Accident made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where it received the Palme d’Or, one of the most prestigious film awards, given to the director of the Best Feature Film of the Official Competition.

Panahi travelled to France for the ceremony, marking his first trip outside of Iran in 14 years. The moment he was announced as the winner, he appeared emotional, smiled, and remained seated for a few seconds.

Reflecting on the moment, he says he was thinking about a phone call he had received from prison in Iran just a day earlier.

A man wearing an all-black outfit and sunglasses accepts an award on the stage.

After his mentor Abbas Kiarostami, Jafar Panahi is the second Iranian filmmaker to win the Palme d’Or award. Source: Getty / Stephane Cardinale / Corbis

“This friend who contacted me said that ‘we had found a sense of hope inside the prison and that we wanted to do something here after you succeeded’,” Panahi says.

He was moved by the call and says he felt a responsibility to live up to their hopes.

“I was constantly feeling responsible. I was constantly feeling anxious. I don’t know what the right word would be to describe it. I was starting to think that there was a heavy burden on my shoulders. I didn’t sleep that night,” he says.

“When they announced it [the Palme d’Or], I just breathed a sigh of relief … I didn’t have the strength to get up from my chair at all.”

I said to myself, ‘this burden has been lifted off my shoulders and I won’t disappoint those friends again. Now, they will be happy in prison.’

The film will screen for the first time in Australia this weekend at the 72nd Sydney Film Festival, which is also screening a retrospective of his feature films titled Cinema in Rebellion.

Panahi made a surprise guest appearance at the festival’s opening gala, which was kept under wraps for his safety.

His trip to Australia is his second time leaving Iran since 2010.

A man in an all-black outfit and sunglasses folds his hands as people clap around him.

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident will be screened at the Sydney Film Festival. Credit: Belinda Rolland Photography/Belinda Rolland

‘I cannot live outside Iran’

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, many Iranian artists, such as Panahi, have turned to the underground mode of filmmaking to continue creating their artworks in secret, while others have decided to leave.

“I’m also one of those people who can’t live anywhere except Iran. This may be my weakness, that I can’t adapt to another place,” Panahi says.

“Knowing myself, on the very first day I arrived [in Cannes] … I announced that I would come back [to Iran] under any circumstances, and I did what I believed in.

“I’m not a brave person at all. I just announced this because I’m not able to live outside of Iran. What danger could there be? Is it more dangerous than a woman going out in Iran without wearing a hijab?”

Despite the heartfelt support of the world cinema community, Panahi’s Palme d’Or win was not welcomed by Iranian officials, who summoned France’s chargé d’affaires after the French foreign minister called the film “a gesture of resistance”.

They also publicly condemned the French government, citing its “misuse of its role as host of a film event to advance its political agenda against the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

But despite the criticism and ongoing concerns for Panahi’s safety, the filmmaker returned home after the Cannes Film Festival, where he was greeted by fans at the airport, clapping and chanting “Woman, Life, Freedom” — the rallying cry of the women’s rights movement sparked after the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022.

“As soon as you feel that hope has been created — that moment of receiving an award and that phone call that was in prison — as soon as you see these in the people who have come to welcome you, you feel happy.”